You're confusing Warband size with Box size. 12 in a single warband is certainly not a cash grab. While there are a few people who would need to buy an extra captain or so, most people have heros just lying around doing nothing. Warbands was, I believe, to really change the game up and bring some more balance to the rules without really changing anything. The box size however, is definitely a cash grab, but that has nothing to do with warbands.

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I think it has everything to do with warbands. Warbands is a perfect excuse to sell troops in groups of 12. I'm suggesting the warbands rules were written very cleverly to accompany the reorganization of the boxed sets and to take advantage of the Finecast heroes. I think it was a conscious decision to halve boxed sets to twelve models while forming warbands around units of twelve, not a happy coincidence.

The Warbands/Box Reorganization revived and reformed the skirmish game SBG in time for the Hobbit while maintaining and/or maximizing the same level of profits GW would have been making during the mass combat game WotR.

Like I said, the 12-man boxes encourage players to just buy their army in chunks of a boxed set and a a blister pack. Do you recall the "charts" that were floating around on the GW site when the warbands were first introduced? They followed this structure--"Buy this blister and this boxed set for 'x' points." The marketing and gaming were designed in conjunction, regardless if the rules work well or not.

I guess I should have made myself clear, I think that the rules were changed before the decision to halve the box size. While I may be wrong, that's just what I think.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

Ah. The release of the Warbands rules and the halving of the boxed sets were done officially at the same time in January, so there's no way to know which decision was made first behind the scenes. Imo, they were probably made in conjunction.

Exactly. I think part of the reason (in addition to everything I already said) for warbands was also in preparation for the Hobbit. You see the hunter orcs split up into packs led by various "captains" (Fimbul, etc), Goblin Town is ruled by the Great Goblin, but he has a number of lieutenants, even the dwarves in the flash backs had several captains leading alongside Thorin.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

Your generously assigning them benevolent motives I seriously doubt they had. What might be a better way to put it is; be thankful that they bothered to give us something when increased the price of some box sets and took half of the box contents away.

You're confusing the end result of a useful rule with the motivation for it. I.E. a cash grab. Consider this, GW knew they where going to release an updated SBG (The Hobbit rulebook) they could have added unit placement and a hero to troop ratio in this new book. They didn't why was that? Because the motivation for the rule was the halving of the box sets.

Ah, but maybe it was in fact benevolence on their part. Maybe they thought of that, but discounted it considering their sprue limitations. I mean, if goblin captains could only have 7 warriors under their warband, then a box of 12 doesn't even have enough for 2 warbands...imagine the outrage then!

Imagine they demanded that every troop in a warband be equipped the same. The fact that they did not do this doesn't make them Santa Claus.

You seem to think that the rule makers are the same people who would have the power to halve the box sizes. I don't think Troke or Ward or whoever had any say in the box size. All I'm saying is don't blame warbands or the rules makers for the price increase, blame whoever thought that GW could make more money with the new box size.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

I'm not blaming the game writers for the box content decrease. I am complaining that the new rule didn't cover every issue like the the Army of the Dead. The reason for that is a demand placed on them by the company to make their naked cash grab palatable.

And in IMO they've been pretty successful in squashing outrage with this rule. By giving back with a new rule and nice scenarios.

As has been mentioned, you can use a Captain of Dol Amroth to lead you Dead Army. Not thematic, but you can lead them.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
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Personally I'd say Aragorn being the heir and all. But these are just shots in the dark.

At the end of the day, Games Workshop, regardless of how they go about pricing them, do make extremely high quality games and models. This there is no argument to, i would not be playing the game if it was not something i found incredibly attractive. The game, by definition, is about strategy, and warbands seems to put alot more focus on that. You have to split your force up into groups that can, if they need to, work on their own, micro management and personalization becomes more important.

Strange as it sounds, i can see alot of the painters and collectors becoming enthralled by warbands. There is no need to purchase more than one of a single box of any 1 type of warrior for the sake of army building, your army can contain anything alongside anything. The games are also shorter which is a plus for the 'casuals'

Ofcourse it was produced to make money, GW are a company, and need money. That said, warbands is a logical step in the right direction imo. I've only played a few games of it with the hobbit but oo gosh darn i liked 'em.

Love them or hate them this is a hobby sold by a company with a desire to on one hand keep the customer happy, and on the other keep the investors and share holders happy. Can I fault GW for wanting money? No, and as far as hobbies go we get off the hook pretty lightly.

I for one love the warband rules. I have tried to get friends in my game store on board with SBG for quite a while but It was always a pain to describe army composition to people with the Characters spread throughout the jounrey books and realm books and main rulebook, and honestly a pretty weak system for making an army compared to the other two lines. I mean, if you played a lot it made sense, but if you didn't play a lot, or were a 40k or Fantasy gamer it was not a very intuitive step.

Now, with warbands when my friends ask me I just tell them to get the finecast box and a 24 (or two 12) man box of the army they like and that's a good start. Soon they discover special heroes and combinations and expand on not only their knowledge of the game, but their tactics as well. And it all comes pretty naturally to them since the entrance is easy.

I also think that the 12 man unit works pretty nice for other reasons. Squads are usually 8-12 people, then the Platoon is two to four squads and three to five Platoons in a Company. Seems to fit the warbands nicely and give an escalating military feel to it. For humans/dwarves/elves we could rationally say it is for organization purposes in a formal military. For evil goblins it would probably be the most that a single goblin could keep control of without lieutenants to help him. Either way 12 is a pretty good number historically for a squad size, and it works well with the box size so for me its a win/win

Personally I love the warband rules. I think as others have stated they make collecting easier for beginners but, far more importantly, it also adds a lot to the game. I think certain cheesy builds (Leggy and Wood Elves) have been eliminated and the games are far more interesting now with the varied deployment rules. Hold Ground in particular is very tactical considering you might get to chose where to deploy your opponents troops. I think that also has some affect, at least on me, about army composition, for example, if I have 50 spare points I might be tempted to buy an Uruk shaman on his own (which doesn't make a lot of theme sense) but the fear he'll be deployed all on his own and slaughtered in the first turn is normally enough to stop me.

As for whether it was a business or a gameplay decision first I have no idea, although it's a genuinely interesting topic. Let's face it, most of us have no real insight (educated guesses don't count) into how GW make this kind of decision. I personally think that the games designers came up with the warband rules first and then the suits figured out a way to exploit the rules for financial gain. I've still not quite got over the whole "WOW YOU CAN BUY A WHOLE WARBAND IN A BOX" marketing strategy when of course you could previously buy...2 warbands in a box.

If it was entirely a business decision to make money then they would have made the war band size 18 and sold them in boxes of 12 to force you to buy 2 boxes to make 1 warband. I actually think that the (somewhat arbitrary) size of 12 per warband is probably because (almost) every plastic infantry type came on a sprue of 12 models and cavalry came on a sprue of 6 thus making them easily collectable.

Ultimately I think the Games designers looked at the existing range and made their decision of 12 per warband based on that and then the suits (boo hiss) swung in and halved the box sizes.

But, of course, I could be wrong.

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